Clutch from Maryland, USA, released their latest album Earth Rocker in Spring 2013 selling 22,000 copies in the first week of release and debuting at position No. 15 on The Billboard 200 chart (source). The cover artwork is as amazing as the music is. It was created by Nick Lakiotes, a longtime Clutch art director, who has worked on previous efforts, including “Robot Hive/Exodus” and “Strange Cousins From The West”.

Frontman Neil Fallon said in an Interview with Loudwire, “We wanted something iconic. We kept saying we needed our own ‘Eddie’ (Iron Maiden) or our own ‘Snaggletooth’ (Motorhead).” He revealed, “We were going to call the record ‘Crucial Velocity’ and we were working on some images for that and it just ended up looking like a Boston record. We just weren’t feeling it. It’s not that those album covers are bad, it’s just not us. So we started thinking that maybe we could call it ‘Earth Rocker’ and Nick [Lakiotes] started sketching this thing up and when we saw where it was going it became like a current idea. It was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what the Earth Rocker looks like.’ I didn’t know what he looked like until I saw that picture and he just kind of exudes a very calm, confident sense of ethereal power without being intimidating.”

I think it’s a perfectly executed mixture of different styles and motifs. The Indian face, Indian ornaments, a Tron-like background pattern, a handmade, almost watercolor-y texture and bold and modern outlines. Probably the best artwork they’ve ever had.